Expanded Profiles

Tripthi Pillai

Tripthi Pillai (Ph.D. English, Loyola University Chicago) joined Coastal's faculty in 2010 as Assistant Professor of British Renaissance literature. Her areas of expertise are Renaissance drama, critical theory, and cultural studies. Tripthi's recent scholarship focuses on the eruption of unstable temporalities in early modern drama. Some of her publications include "Constructing Experiences and Charting Narratives: The Future In/Of A Midsummer Night's Dream" in A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Critical Guide (Continuum Renaissance Drama, 2010) and "The Middleton Timeline" in Middleton in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2011). She is currently working on a book-length study of political futurity in seventeenth century drama and also on a shorter project on the interplay of mourning and collaboration in Shakespeare's late plays. Tripthi teaches courses on Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, World literature, Literature and Culture, and College Composition. Her pedagogy combines close reading practices with cross-disciplinary and theoretical explorations of texts. Tripthi works closely with students and encourages them to adopt a process that she refers to as "critical self-empowerment" - a means by which students not only identify their own cultural interests and expertise but also combine them with established and emerging critical methods to produce innovative close readings of diverse texts, be it Shakespeare's Othello or YouTube spoofs of classical literature. She also works closely with Coastal's Center for Peace and Conflict Studies and the Women's and Gender Studies Program. In her free time, Tripthi enjoys traveling home to India, wandering the globe, collaborating with friends on film projects, and concocting culinary treasures. (She's convinced she is an excellent cook and might have made her name in the restaurant business, had Shakespeare not interrupted her plans.) She has also a keen eye for footwear and suspects thought hasn't yet found the necessary evidence that Christopher Marlowe had the finest shoes among the Renaissance playwrights.